The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership A Critical Perspective

Most research into leadership has presented leaders as heroic, charismatic and transformational ?visionaries?. The leader, whether in business, politics or any other field, is the most important factor in determining whether organizations succeed or fail. Indeed, despite the fundamental mistakes which have, arguably, directly led to global economic recession, it is often still taken for granted that transformational leadership is a good thing, and that leaders should have much more power than followers to decide what needs to be done.

The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership confronts this orthodoxy by illustrating how such approaches can encourage narcissism, megalomania and poor decision-making on the part of leaders, at great expense to those organizations they are there to serve. Written in a lively and engaging style, the book uses a number of case studies to illustrate the perils of transformational leadership, from the Jonestown tragedy in 1978 when over 900 people were either murdered or committed suicide at the urging of their leader, to an analysis of how banking executives tried to explain away their role in the 2008 financial crisis

This provocative and hugely important book offers a rare critical perspective in the field of leadership studies. Concluding with a new approach that offers an alternative to the dominant transformational model, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership will be an invaluable text for academics interested in leadership, students on leadership courses requiring a more critical perspective, and anyone concerned with how people lead people, and the lessons we can learn.

PART ONE: LEADERSHIP AGENCY UNRAVELLED 1. Introduction: Why the dark side? Why now? 2. Transformational leadership: The dynamics of excessive leader agency 3. Coercive persuasion, power and corporate culturism. 4. Spirituality and leadership: Using ideology to enhance leaders’ power. 5. The dark side of leadership and silence in the workplace. 6. The folly and the dangers of leadership education in business schools PART TWO: CASE STUDIES 7. The dark side of leadership in corporate America: Enron revisited. 8.The Militant Tendency’s long march to oblivion: Conformity and authoritarian leadership on the left. 9. Leadership, group suicide and mass murder: Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate through the looking glass 10. Accounting for failure: Bankers in the spotlight PART THREE: CONCLUSION 11. Reimagining leadership and followership: A processual, communication perspective

Dennis Tourish is a Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published seven previous books on leadership and organizational communication and serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Human Relations and Management Communication Quarterly,where he was previously a co-editor. He is a Fellow of the Leadership Trust Foundation and a co-editor of the journal Leadership.